2009 Abstracts - Association for Chemoreception Sciences

#P108 Poster session III: Cortical chemosensoryprocessing/Receptor genomics and molecular biologyThe effect of unilateral naris occlusion on gene expression inthe mouse olfactory mucosa and bulbDavid M. Coppola 1 , Yan Zhang 2 , Oswald R. Crasta 21Randolph Macon College Ashland, VA, USA, 2 BioinformaticsInstitute Blacksburg, VA, USAUnilateral naris occlusion (UNO) has been the most commonmethod of effecting stimulus deprivation in studies of olfactoryplasticity. However, in the >100 years that have elapsed since thefirst reported UNO experiment, many contradictory results haveaccumulated. Early experiments focused on deleterious effectsassumed to be due to the stimulus restriction that undoubtedlyaccompanies UNO. More recently, a number of studies havepointed to ‘compensatory’ effects of UNO. Unfortunately, fewdata are available on indirect UNO effects, i.e. those unrelated toodor deprivation. Modern high-throughput methods such asmicroarray analysis may help rectify the deficits in ourunderstanding of UNO phenomenology as well as revealing newavenues to study olfactory plasticity specifically and neuralplasticity more generally. Here we report the results of the firstknown analysis of genome-wide effects on olfactory mucosa andbulb induced by UNO using the Affymetrix 430.2 chip set. RNAwas extracted from pooled tissue samples of 25-day-old femaleCD-1 mice using the Qiagen RNA easy kit. Some subjects hadreceived UNO on the first postnatal day. The three treatmentconditions: UNO open side, UNO occluded side, and untreatedmice, were run in triplicate for mucosa and in duplicate for bulbusing different groups of animals. Chip data were normalizedusing the gcRMA method and only genes that showed both atwo-fold change and a p-value of